Sidney Glass

I was away on Niagara-on-the-Lake [Ontario] on a little weekend holiday. I came home and my mother and my sister told me, there’s a special letter for you and I said, a special letter, what’s that? That’s the year I turned 21. I says, oh, so, they’d said, you have a letter from the government. I said, what for? They said, you have to join the army. I said, do I have to join the army? So my sister, yes, because there’s conscription. I says, gosh, what does that mean? That means that the government decided that all the fellows turning 21 must comply with this letter and go to the [Canadian National] Exhibition [grounds] and join the army. I says, oh well. First, we did training and then they put us on half-carriers, half-track and half, you know, wheels and we practiced on there and do this and do that. And I was in a band for a while, I was a drummer boy. And then they put me into this, we did route marching and then half-carriers and stuff like that. When we reached England, they put us in different regiments and they put from the Queen’s Own Rifles - I joined here. But there, they broke up the Queen’s Own Rifles and they put us in different regiments because they had to fill up different regiments with soldiers from the Queen’s Own because they needed more soldiers in different regiments. So they put me into the Argyll; so many in this regiment, so many in this regiment and so many in that regiment. And they put me in the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders. I had to put in the shells on the half-tank that shoots the bombs over, like in a barrel, you know. See, I was putting the shells into the barrels and the officer beside me used to tell me where and how and what range and stuff like that.